“It’s always too late, whenever you take a photograph.”
This laconic remark, which I heard during a recent artist’s talk in Berlin, bubbled up from a discussion upon the often-tragic indexicality or nonindexicality of contemporary photographic practice. JPEGs taken for wonders. Smoke plumes without embers. Footprints crossing the beaches of abandoned resorts. Hands that point at nothing in particular, and the gullible eyes that follow the lead of pointing index fingers. There is indeed something awkward to the snapshot’s belatedness. Its untimeliness. The ways in which, the second the shutter clicks—or that our thumb melds with the appropriate region of our phone’s liquid plasma displays and the resultant file is uploaded to a distant server—the instant we sought to “capture” has passed by and something else enters the frame. Someone blinks, the rubble dust envelopes the scene, the light changes, the hoodie we saw underground bearing the phrase “THEIR DESTINIES WOULD INTERTWINE” disappears behind an arriving subway’s blur, the wind cajoles a neighboring branch we hadn’t before noticed into the family portrait. Photography then remains, contrary to the terms in which it is sold to us by Silicon Valley manufacturers who stress its total immediacy as an instrument for perceiving the world, a stubbornly untimely pursuit.
Can we not also say, “It’s always too late, whenever you start to index”?
The second issue of e-flux Index features contributions from Nick Axel, Hallie Ayres, Stephanie Bailey, Xenia Benivolski, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Gail Brager, Lukas Braskisis, Evan Calder Williams, Luis Camnitzer, Gaby Cepeda, Adeline Chia, Jasmina Cibic, Phil Coldiron, Salmaan Craig, Benjamin Crais, Mark DeKay, T. J. Demos, Tom Denman, Ben Eastham, Mariana Fernández, Sylvie Fortin, Victor Galdino, Orit Gat, Gerhub, Boris Groys, Maddie Hampton, Lyn Hejinian, Hide and Seek Audiovisual Art, Vanessa Holyoak, Leigh House, Suzanne Hudson, Dylan Huw, Florian Idenburg, Ana Ivanovska Deskova, Isabel Jacobs, Tom Jeffreys, Juan José Santos, Christina Kiaer, Damjan Kokalevski, Anna Kornbluh, Ekaterina Kulinicheva, Michael Kurtz, Andres Lepik, Ye Liu, Natasha Marie Llorens, Antonia Majaca, Claudio Medeiros, Charles Tonderai Mudede, Chris Murtha, Daniel Muzyczuk, Isadora Neves Marques, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Jason Read, Dominique Routhier, Noah Simblist, Anya Sirota, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Elena Sorokina, Jamila Squire, Jonas Staal, Łukasz Stanek, The New School Art Modality, Xu Tiantian, Oxana Timofeeva, Alberto Toscano, Ecosistema Urbano, Anton Vidokle, Elena Vogman, Xin Wang, Ben Ware, Seth Wheeler, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Zairong Xiang, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, Zhen Zhang, and Arseny Zhilyaev.
Paperback